Stop Chasing Pedigree, Start Building Foundations

So the first thing I really want to stress with this, right, I was trying to work out the best way to structure this type of podcast.

And I thought, well, I'm going to just talk directly to founders at this stage.

And anyone who's in town acquisition, who is in this field or hiring for this, there's a lot of things that you can take away because this is about changing mindsets.

In my opinion, taking all what I've learned and just packaging it up into something that hopefully you can rinse and repeat.

So the first thing is zero to one hiring.

It's foundational.

Obviously, it's foundational, but it's not pedigree, right? It doesn't need to be about recreating another person's team.

It's about building the foundations for your company that you want to grow.

So a lot of the time when I work with these founders at this stage, I do hear, you know, we want to hire people from fame companies or top 10 universities.

Don't get me wrong.

Pedigree can be explored.

Pedigree links with raw intelligence.

If you're a top 10 university, you're clearly experienced.

obviously an intelligent individual or unlike myself probably studied a lot smarter a lot harder at school or if you're employed by a fame company typically you know again levels of intelligence but it shouldn't become a constraint right it shouldn't be we have to take from this environment because that is the recipe that we've been taught that we believe is the right thing because early hires they're not building just your product they're building your culture They're setting your pace.

They're setting the standards.

And yes, hiring from Fang or hiring from Pedigree or looking at ex-founders, it helps to set all of that from the beginning.

But it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the best foundation forever.

Who's to say that person in that corporate company who's really passionate about something on the side isn't the right person for you? So we have to think how I try to teach founders.

Think of it like house, right? Your first few hires at the foundation of your house, you have shitty foundations.

You have a shitty house.

We can decorate it later, right? But if you don't get the foundations, right, you're going to spend years fixing the cracks, so to speak.

So what we need to look at first of all, then it's not okay.

Have they worked at insert whatever company here? Have they gone to this university? Instead, we have to look at the skills.

behind the person not just the core technical skills so pragmatism right for example with time and scope of work are they truly pragmatic and can they emphasize this in a conversation can they move forward in a process or a solution with limited information you know a lot of the time you don't have the perfect understand of who your customer base is going to be.